Teleflip, a Santa Monica, Calif., startup that offers to deliver email to your phone as text messages, raised $4.9 million in a recent financing. GRP II, a fund affiliated with the private-equity firm GRP Management Services, provided the funding.
The company’s Flipmail service automatically redirects email from pre-approved senders to your cellphone as text messages. The service is free, but requires you to hand over your email password and, thus, access to your inbox, to the company, which of course pledges to protect your personal information.
The service is supposed to work both ways, too, in that replying to a “flipped” email from your cellphone in turn generates an email that looks as though it came from your email account. Teleflip will only forward messages from email addresses you specify in advance.
